Court thought he could have walked in with a goat under his arm or a cavalcade of circus freaks in tow and gotten his room quicker and with fewer sideways glances.
He considered turning on his heels and going somewhere else, but the overall squalidness of the place made him feel confident that his secrets, despite whatever the old-timer behind the desk guessed they were, were probably safe here.
He paid in HK dollars that had been left by the CIA in a money belt in the backpack he’d found on the aircraft, then took the stairs out of the lobby and up to the first landing. Here he passed the door that simply read “Happy Foot Massage” with the outline of a foot in front of an outline of the sun, and he turned to take the staircase up to his floor. As he passed the door to the massage location, it opened and a pair of Asian men left together, heading down the stairs without even glancing at Court.
Nice, Court thought. He’d suspected the clientele here might avert their eyes from the other guests, and it was good to see he’d assessed the situation correctly.
If there was one thing in this world Court knew, it was shitty hotels.
He found his little room, and immediately it looked to him like the Pleasant Southeast Orchid Guesthouse had employed the same architect that designed cells in supermax prisons. There was no window in the eight-by-ten-foot box and the ceiling was just six feet above the floor, which added to the claustrophobic feel. The walls were white-painted cinder block that had chipped and yellowed over time, and the ceiling was unpainted particleboard with black mold around the edges.
Court dropped his pack and his roll-aboard in the corner of the room next to the open plastic garbage can and sat down on the dirty bed. Facing forward, he found he could reach out and touch the rust-stained sink, even lean forward and wash his hands if he so desired, though he worried about the color and quality of the water he would find coming out of the faucet.
His gaze settled upon his own face in the little mirror above the basin. He looked exhausted and stressed. He’d killed two men hours earlier, and he’d come a hairsbreadth from dying himself. This had been a decidedly bad opening day, and his face showed the strain of every minute of it.
But Court was just getting started. He knew it was time to shake off the initial setbacks and to go on offense. He’d begin his operation here in Hong Kong, right here, and right now. He’d prep for tomorrow’s action first; then he’d get a few hours’ sleep.
He reached into his backpack, pulled out the plastic bag of items he’d purchased at the pharmacy, and got to work.
Gentry left his low-rent guesthouse at nine a.m., slipping down the stairs and passing through the tiny lobby without the clerk noticing him at all. As he emerged from the dark and dank building out into the already hot morning air, he sported a completely new look. His beard was gone and he’d cut the hair on his head short. Gone, too, were his eyeglasses and his dress clothes, and instead this morning he wore lightweight cargo pants and an adventure-wear short-sleeve shirt designed for warm climates. He donned a burgundy ball cap and sunglasses and had another ball cap — this one faded and gray — folded in his pants between his waistband and his skin.
He didn’t have a backpack or any other luggage with him; just a wallet, a cell phone, a money belt, and a few odds and ends in his pockets.
He descended into Hong Kong’s impossibly clean and organized subway system, called the MTR. He climbed on and off four trains, switched out his ball cap, then finally reemerged at street level on Nathan Road, back in Tsim Sha Tsui, just a few blocks away from the Peninsula.
He didn’t particularly want to come back here, but he had no choice, because his orders from CIA involved speaking with a man who lived in the neighborhood.
Chungking Mansions was one of the most famous buildings in Hong Kong. Virtually a city unto itself, it housed thousands of residences, over one hundred private businesses, and seventeen stories of accommodations ranging from budget at one end of the spectrum to very, very low budget at the other.
Court passed through the wide entrance of the building along with dozens of other people and immediately realized this place wasn’t exactly what he was expecting. Though he’d never been here himself, he’d heard about the building over the years, and he knew it used to be something out of a dystopian novel. For decades criminal activity had run rampant in the filthy dark halls, gangs ruled individual floors, and an almost anarchist society had raged inside the various blocks of the sprawling structure.
But as he walked the halls now, he saw that the famous address was relatively clean, reasonably well organized and run, and, for Hong Kong anyway, quiet and even boring.
It was less like the house of horrors he’d expected and more like a large and run-down shopping mall.
Court had been told in his brief from the Agency that he could find a man in a little office at Chungking Mansions who, it was known by the local CIA shop, had his finger on the pulse of everything that happened here in HK. He’d been a police detective back when the city was a British protectorate, and then after independence he’d switched over to private investigations. His official job now was as the owner of a security consultancy, but the simple truth was that next to nothing went down in Hong Kong without Wu getting wind of it.
The place was full of commerce of all types; the hallways were crammed with impromptu markets and kiosks, many run by African and Middle Eastern businessmen who also rented rooms in the buildings. They were street salesmen back home, here in China to buy wares to restock their home operations. Enough of these travelers had set up kiosks to sell to one another here in the building that Court imagined some of their number never did make it back home; they just spent their time buying crap from low-end Chinese factories and selling crap to other street merchants from afar.
There was a prevalent smell in the building Court could not identify, but it wasn’t pleasant. There was fry grease in the mix, to be sure, but competing incense burners and the body odor of thousands of residents packed tight in a can with limited plumbing options also led to the thick, stifling odor.
Court found all the elevators in this block to be out of order, a significant pain in the ass in a building seventeen stories tall, so he began climbing. Every few floors he looked out the glass door of the stairwell and into the halls of the floor, and he saw mostly residences, some no more than simple affairs separated from one another by curtains.
As was the case in many buildings around here, things got weirder as you went higher. He passed large restaurants and crowded markets and hookah bars, but he kept climbing, all the way to the sixteenth floor. Here he left the stairwell and began reading the little signs on the walls of the offices here.
Many were printed in both English and Mandarin, and Court saw that there were a large number of attorneys, customs agents, and freight forwarders on this level. But down at the last door at the end of a long hallway he came to his destination. The English words on the door plaque read: “Wu K. K. Consultant.”
He knocked on the door and was immediately buzzed in.
He explained to a seventy-something female secretary that he did not have an appointment but needed quick information from Mr. Wu. She asked the American for his business card, and he shrugged, said he would be paying for information but not giving much of any himself. When she inquired where he’d heard about Wu’s consultancy, Court made up a name, saying the man was an attorney from London.